Let's kill the elderly and homeless, too!

Editor’s note: In the spirit of Jonathan Swift’s classic essay, the author offers the following modest proposal.

Upon further reflection, I’ve changed my mind: Killing Terri Schiavo and those like her is a fabulous way make our nation run much more efficiently. But we shouldn’t stop there: Let’s kill the elderly and homeless, too!

Think about it. Most of the elderly sit around growing old, collecting Medicare and Social Security benefits, while contributing little to our nation. And the homeless soak taxpayers daily as they collect welfare checks and lounge around in city shelters.

Of course, this is only the beginning. We should also exterminate all prisoners convicted of serious crimes. Then, let’s get rid of all people suffering from genetic deformities. After that, we can kill those who are grossly obese. The possibilities are endless! Of course, it will be up to the courts to determine what words like “serious crimes,” “deformed,” and “grossly obese” mean.

Like Terri, most of these sorts of people have a low quality of life. Most have little or nothing to contribute to society and are a major drain on America’s resources. While compassionately, mercifully killing them, we could also cut the tax bills of every productive citizen in half in less than a year if we aggressively pursue this option. All we need are the Bush brothers, a few brave judges and lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union to start the heads rolling.

For those who are worried about going too far with such a plan, we can build in an exception process so that those odd individuals who are still contributing citizens can have their lives spared upon review by a panel of judges.

Another possibility is that with all of the bodies we’ll be accumulating, perhaps some bright scientist can find a way to burn them as fuel to help offset America’s rising energy costs. This would also eliminate burial expenses and inefficient uses of land resources.

The Nazis took Darwin’s ideas of natural selection, in particular the idea of survival of the fittest in the animal kingdom, and applied them to the human world and society (Darwin’s “Origin of the Species” had been published in 1859). It was argued that allowing disabled people to live and have children led to the “unfit” reproducing more quickly than “the fit.” It was said that this weakened society’s ability to function efficiently, placing an unnecessary toll on non-disabled people.

The Nazis claimed that the social and economic problems that Germany experienced in the 1920s and early 1930s were due in part to the weakening of the population created by an unfair burden.

The nations of the world still look to the United States for leadership. Let’s show them what Americans are really capable of!